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Orson Welles' "mainstream" stab, naturally a tale of infiltration. The Nazi war criminal, not "dead and cremated" but a New England professor about to marry the Supreme Court Justice's daughter (Loretta Young), "the camouflage is perfect." The former concentration camp kommandant (Konstantin Shayne) is released from prison to lead the authorities to him, he's killed in an unbroken take of striking bravura. (High angle in the woods with students in the distance on a paper chase, track left with dialogue, low angle for the strangulation in the bushes.) "There will be another war?" "Well, of course." Small-town America, church and gym and curtains drawn at home, the Ambersons fondness gradually darkened by denial. The tenacious mensch on his trail (Edward G. Robinson) puffs on a pipe contemplatively, not quite convinced by the fugitive's dinnertime spiel on Teutonic bloodlust: "Who but a Nazi would deny Karl Marx was a German because he was a Jew?" The joke of the obsessive extrovert struggling to efface himself, Welles luxuriates in it amid noir gloom. The kinship with Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt has been amply noted, the Foreign Correspondent windmills figure in the image of the tower clock's hands turning backwards. Self-service at the local pharmacy, mirrors and chess with the proprietor (Billy House), "a game you gotta keep your mind on." Poison for Red the dog, for unbelieving eyes documented horrors on a flickering projector, cf. Fuller's Verboten! Emerson's guilty footprints, a foretaste of Mr. Arkadin in the South American detour, a vertiginous solution with the bronzed figurine as avenging angel. "My sense of proportion is failing me these days." The newfound respectability is promptly detonated in The Lady from Shanghai, Welles wouldn't have it any other way. Cinematography by Russell Metty. With Philip Merivale, Richard Long, Byron Keith, and Martha Wentworth. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |